Seven Wonders Read Free

There was a sickening sound, like a butcher’s blade going through a block of raw meat, and Jeremy looked down. His eyes went wide.
    Something long and almost impossibly white was sticking out of the center of his chest.
    Jeremy crashed back against the glass desk, sending his laptop clattering to the floor. The figure in front of him was moving forward now, closing the distance between them. Jeremy felt himself sliding to the floor. As his knees touched the vinyl panels, he realized there was something in the palm of his hand. The thumb drive, hanging from the scarab key ring. He must have yanked it from the flat-screen on his way down. He had no idea if the data transfer was complete, but it hardly seemed to matter, because now the pain was starting to work through the shock in searing, gut-wrenching waves, emanating from the thing embedded in his chest. And then he realized that the pain wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was that he could no longer breathe.
    As his body crumpled forward, he used his last burst of strength to shove the thumb drive deep into the hollow scarab, hiding it inside the keychain. A second later, his cheek touched vinyl, his eyes rolled up, and all that remained was the afterglow on his dying retinas of a pair of glowing snakes, intertwining in a sea of black.

CHAPTER TWO
    Okay, Jack. It’s not like this is the stupidest thing you’ve ever done… .
    Jack Grady slid one gloved hand over the high-tensile aluminum rope, rechecking the iron clasps where it connected to his suspension harness. His other hand was straight out in front of him, his wrist working back and forth to steady his body in midair.
    But hell, it’s got to be in the top five… .
    He tried not to look straight down, where his work boots were dangling above a blackness that was both thick and palpable. Likewise, he did his best not to dwell on the fact that the only thing between him and a plunge that would end in certain death was that taut, seemingly floss-thin aluminum rope.
    “Everything okay down there, Doc?”
    The speaker in Jack’s fiberglass crash helmet was the size of a doll’s eye, and still the voice was like a gunshot in his ears, amplified by the sheer rock walls of the pit. Jack fought to keep his body still, but even the slightest tremble was enough to put him into a gentle spin, the yellow cone of light from the flashlight attached to his open visor dancing across the three-hundred-and-sixty-degree circle of stone that surrounded him.
    “Like a piece of bait on a hook, kid,” he responded.
    There was a laugh on the other end of the speaker. Then the aluminum rope gave a slight jerk, and Jack was inching downward again, into the soupy black.
    He kept his breathing normal as he went, noting that the air had turned markedly cooler since he’d passed the hundred-foot depth marker they’d clipped to the rope. He also noticed that there was a new, musty scent, perhaps some sort of microscopic vegetation or bacteria living in the crags and seams of the nearly sheer rock walls. It didn’t seem likely that anything substantial could live down there, although the pit itself appeared to be naturally occurring—Jack’s best guess, the result of a meteor strike that, according to the local oral tradition and held up by the geological dating, had struck the area around thirteen thousand years ago.
    About time someone came down here to kick the tires and check the oil… .
    Jack gave it another ten minutes, inching downward, his body still revolving in a nearly silent spin, before he reached up and tapped the side of his helmet.
    “Okay, hold up. I’m going to do a splat check.”
    The rope jerked to a stop. He was a good hundred and fifty feet down now, and still the pit appeared exactly the same as it had when they first broke through the limestone mantle beneath the dig site and peered down into the black drop from above.
    Just getting to that moment had been heroic enough. First the plane from Boston,